In what seems to be a consistent effort to reawaken the golden era attitudes of Western Colonialisation, many farangs in Thailand today go under the impression that Thai people are ‘strange’.

Well I’ve got news for you. There’s a little term that clever people like me call ‘ethnocentricity’. In farang form this word means ‘we is better dan u’. You’re not, by the way. Therefore, thinking you are really doesn’t help you.

My use of this term means to imply that you have no logical reason to think that just because something I do is different to something you do, that thing is ‘weird’ or ‘strange’ or ‘odd’ or ‘not normal’. Normality is an essentially contested concept at the best of times, you idiot, but please don’t make it worse by trying to claim you have the ‘normal’ way of doing things.

One complaint I often hear from farangs in restaurants who think I am too stupid to understand them is that Thai people do everything too slowly. They say it’s as if we don’t like living – as if we don’t grasp the splendour and beauty of life like farangs do. As if we, somehow enveloped by our own latent hegemony, we ‘cannot look beyond ourselves’.

Cannot look beyond ourselves? You imbeciles! Firstly, it’s a hot country (you know, all that sweat dripping from your eyes..) and secondly, Buddha didn’t reach enlightenment by flapping his arms all day, wearing neck ties and running to catch taxis/buses/friends/nothing. What has running about the place done for your cultures? Hmm.. we’ve got higher rates of heart disease, we’ve got increased levels of worl-related stress, we’ve got higher suicide rates..need I go on.

I was in Orielly’s pub the other day and put on my usual ‘I can’t understand English’ face to lull the unsuspecting farangs around me into a false sense of security. Minutes into my fried rice and the fat German to the left of me had decided it was safe to begin what is commonly known as ‘Moaning like a little baby’. The poor girl sitting next to him, a 5ft Esarn girl carrying an expression not dissimilar to someone who has just been forced to read Satre’s ‘Being and Nothing’ against their will, had to listen to why her people and her country had not quite yet ‘developed’ enough to be called a ‘democracy’.

I wanted to educate the guy but I expect I would only have had an invitation to the next annual shit-on-a-bargirl competition that those Germans seem so keen on.

When Thai people forgive you for royally cocking up some perfectly simple custom of ours, we do so because we do not think our culture is somehow above or better than yours. More often than not we seek to emulate Western culture. Frankly, I have no idea why.

Day after day I hear stories from friends, colleagues, relatives and the man who sells me my lottery ticket about farangs doing stupid, silly, weird, wonderful and often odd things. Whether this be the simplest (and forgiveable) slip of cultures or a large embarassing foot in-the-mouth (literally!), these stories tend to follow a common theme.

Farangs are funny.

 I’ll share some of these stories with you, along with some more sterner points of view as to the state of the Thai national attitude toward foreigners in Thailand and why the status quo may finally have to be changed.